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AI is making junior devs useless

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Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#391

Post by keeda »

Jestzer wrote: post #389
jimbokun wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then any student who cares about his or her grades will change his or her study habits very quickly.

I would call that an optimistic take. It’s far more likely kids will complain, which leads to parents complaining, which leads to the teacher changing whatever was being complained about. From my experiences, school seems to not be a place where people take accountability, but instead, play a constant game of shifting blame when failure arises.

Yes, unfortunately, and we have already seen this happening for a while now with grade inflation:

https://www.ed.gov/about/homeroom-blog/addressing-grade-infl...

https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/grade-infla...

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#392

Post by keeda »

JackSlateur wrote: post #387
keeda wrote: post #231

I maintain that in the future, any person wishing to learn any skill (not just coding!) will need to willingly eschew the use of AI when learning until they have "built the muscles". The literature is clear that repeated, hands-on practice is really the only way to build skills. I suspect the progression will be "No AI until intuition (whatever that is for that skill)" -> "Gradual use of AI to understand where it fal…

The literature is also clear: lack of practice leads to atrophy

Yeah I expect, just like physical exercise, people will need to get their hands dirty on a regular basis to stay competitive.

In fact, this is nothing new, and even encoded as a requirement for many professions like lawyers and doctors: to maintain their licenses, they are required to take hours of "professional development" every year or so to keep their skills up-to-date.

This process is regularly gamed, of course, but I suspect with AI people won't have that luxury.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#394

Post by fasbiner »

slibhb wrote: post #2

I think this concern is overblown. AI is an incredible teaching tool. It's probably better for teaching/explaining than for writing code. This will make the next generation of junior devs far more effective than previous generations. Not because they're skipping the fundamentals...because they have a better grasp of the fundamentals due to back-and-forth with infinitely patient AI teachers.

Presumably you do a lot of back-and-forth with AI, and as many other commenters have pointed out, this seems to have made you more credulous and less informed.

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#397

Post by xnx »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #10

As I tell my students: juniors, you must write the code https://htmx.org/essays/yes-and/ Everyone else: we must let the juniors write the code. Seniors come from juniors. If you want seniors, you must let the juniors write the code.

> If you want seniors, you must let the juniors write the code.

I have my doubts. One way to think about AI is another layer of abstraction on top of computer languages. Many good application developers never learn the layers one or two down the existing abstraction stack (assembly, etc.).

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#398

Post by jfreds »

hodgesrm wrote: post #136
jfreds wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I burnt out helping a junior on my team for the past few months. It was just terribly obvious she was feeding my responses directly into a chatbot to fix instead of actually understanding the issue. I can’t really even blame her, there isn’t much incentive to actually learn

That sounds like a bad hire, not a junior. Why didn’t your manager help fix that?

Very bad hire. I’ve gently said as much to my manager and skip. But for some reason hiring is hard and firing is hard, and we’re a small team, so I’ve been told to just lower my standards. Yeah, I know

Re: AI is making junior devs useless

#399

Post by jplusequalt »

tim333 wrote: post #346
keeda wrote: post #231

I maintain that in the future, any person wishing to learn any skill (not just coding!) will need to willingly eschew the use of AI when learning until they have "built the muscles". The literature is clear that repeated, hands-on practice is really the only way to build skills. I suspect the progression will be "No AI until intuition (whatever that is for that skill)" -> "Gradual use of AI to understand where it fal…

>"built the muscles" You can build muscles by digging a field by hand but most people commercially use tractors. And operating tractors is a skill but a different one. I imagine it'll go like that with AI. People will use it and learn the skill of using AI. I mean you can learn the skill the machine does if you want like learning to write machine code rather than using a compiler but there may be a limited number of…

>You can build muscles by digging a field by hand but most people commercially use tractors.

Have you met a farmer? Most farmers are strong as all hell.

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